Filter by Country

Grand Challenges is a family of initiatives fostering innovation to solve key global health and development problems. Each initiative is an experiment in the use of challenges to focus innovation on making an impact. Individual challenges address some of the same problems, but from differing perspectives.

Mark Kendall of the University of Queensland in Australia will design and test nanopatches, small patches consisting of microscopic silicon projections coated with a malaria vaccine in dry form, to target immunologically-sensitive cells within the skin's outer layers – that are missed by the needle and syringe – to induce unique and protective immune response against the disease.

Nur Alam of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh will test whether adding L-isoleucine and Vitamin D to food served to hospitalized children will induce secretion of antimicrobial peptides that can aid recovery from acute diarrhea and pneumonia.

Odile Ouwe Missi Oukem of Cameroon's Centre International de Reference Chantal Biya will set up a suite of computer tools to manage and analyze biological, clinical and epidemiological data collected from African HIV-infected patients to better study HIV resistance to antiretroviral drugs.

Dr. Ryan Lilien of the University of Toronto in Canada will work to computationally model the structural and functional effects of point mutations on a target protein's active site. With the development of predictive models of pathogen evolution and the spread of resistance, this information can be used to guide drug development and optimization.

Timothy Geary at McGill University in Canada proposed screening chemicals derived from the biological diversity found in Africa to identify lead compounds for the development of drugs to treat infections caused by parasitic nematode worms. In this project’s Phase I research, Dr. Geary established drug discovery centers at the Universities of Botswana and Cape Town, South Africa to screen for compounds that target a nematode family of peptidergic G Protein-coupled receptors. In Phase II, the team is expanding the screening efforts.

Francis Nano of Canada's University of Victoria will introduce essential genes found in Arctic bacteria into the genomes of “warm-loving” pathogens, making them unable to grow at core body temperatures. Such microbes could survive on human skin, which is cold enough to allow for replication and the stimulation of a strong immune system response, but not survive further dissemination into deeper and warmer tissue.

Ms. Sanah Jowhari at TheraCarb, a biotechnology company in Canada, will apply polymer-based drug technology to capture and remove the Cholera toxin from the body of a host, and validate an approach to developing a viable drug candidate for Cholera.

Volker Gerdts of Canada's Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization proposes to use live viral vectors to immunize fetuses during pregnancy to induce immune responses in the unborn baby, thereby protecting the infant against early life infections.

With evidence that microRNA can interfere with host immune response, Qian Gao of Fudan University in China will compare microRNA expression profiles of those with active and latent TB to detect which genes which have significant differences in expression.